


Though I Do Believe In You

by Scromlin



Category: Labyrinth (1986)
Genre: Deaf Character, F/M, Jareth has BIG feelings, Sarah has hearing loss
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:27:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27021229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scromlin/pseuds/Scromlin
Summary: Sarah has an ear infection. In retrospect, Sarah should probably have taken the time to thoroughly dry off after being caught in a downpour. Being distracted by the unfairness of the world and having a good dramatic door slam & bed flop about it, only allowed other, deeper and less visible unfairness to seize its opportunity. She knew this from experience, but certain Goblin-related events of the evening drove the detail entirely out of her mind.
Comments: 27
Kudos: 50





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first ever fanfic, depicting a fun feature of my life that I don't often see depicted. I aged Sarah up to 18 and aged Jareth down, because the age difference has always skeeved me AND because the only being in this or any realm that is as big of a teenage drama queen as Sarah is Jareth. There are some stepmom feels in this, but I don't think their relationship will be a big plot point.

In retrospect, Sarah should probably have taken the time to thoroughly dry off after being caught in a downpour. Being distracted by the unfairness of the world and having a good dramatic door slam & bed flop about it, only allowed other, deeper and less visible unfairness to seize its opportunity. She knew this from experience, but certain Goblin-related events of the evening drove the detail entirely out of her mind. 

Ear issues had plagued her since childhood, and implanted tubes, while they resolved some issues, created others. Specifically, they made her more vulnerable to water getting deep into her inner ear. 

She was high on the endorphin rush of victory when she returned home that night. Celebrating with her friends and enemies, now revealed to her as not enemies at all, but the friends she had needed to give her something to struggle against, a catharsis for her angst and passion, she felt weightless and exuberant, both powerful and childlike. Dizzy, almost. Like she was still falling through the fragments of the Escher room. She caught a sight of white wings beating once, twice, from the tree outside her window into the night, and her stomach swooped a little harder than was entirely explainable. 

She woke up the next morning sick, feverish, and with a little ocean trapped in her skull. It pressed to find a way out and roared that it couldn’t find one. Experimentally, she pinched her nose and blew. Sharp stabbing pain and a high pitched shriek sounded on the inside, making her flinch. 

Well, that’s just peachy. Fuck. 

She tried yawning and swallowing but the pressure and the roaring were unimpressed. She felt a slow tidal roll in her gut, a sense of unreliability of the surface of her own bed. At any moment it could buck her right off. She’d have to hold it down to make sure it behaved itself. 

Irene was at her door, the knocking discernable as a vibration and muffled thump but her voice lost. Sarah stubbornly screwed herself into the blankets and was surprised and a little mollified when Irene’s cool wrist ducked beneath them to find her forehead. She didn’t know what to do with Irene when she wasn’t hurling invective towards her. It wasn’t fair that she would come into her room when she felt so awful! When she needed her mother. 

She stayed home that day. As a senior in High School she had taken ASL for years, but didn’t find much use for it, as few faculty or friends spoke it. Her hearing friends thought that the world was just more quiet for her than for them. They didn’t understand that it was actually never silent, and that just talking louder didn’t help her. She could hear every sound made inside her own body. Constant goblin shrieking and whining played in the background, beneath every other sound, and over it all, the roar of her own private ocean. Other voices got lost in the tumult, until it was easier for her to just disengage and float away internally. 

It also wasn’t just the difference between hearing less or more, or better or worse. It was how her body lost track of where it was in space, the sense that the ground was simply a thin film over an endless body of water, moving with it in ways she couldn’t predict. It made her body awkward and unbearably vulnerable.

When she couldn’t hear, she also couldn’t speak well. She couldn’t remember her lines, she couldn’t make sentences string together the way she wanted to, she trailed off in the middle of sentences, she couldn’t tell if she was being too loud or too quiet, she talked to her own feet. The verbal equivalent of mincing through an unfamiliar room in the pitch dark. She had absolutely no enthusiasm about trying to make it through the delicate social posturing and barrage of sounds and movements that is High School that way. 

Fuck her Chem test. She would be going to exactly one place today, and that was back to sleep. 

Irene had left her some time earlier, with a hot pack on her aching ear, some tablets, and, jarringly, a magazine. Something Sarah would never have picked up on her own, one of Irene’s. The kind of magazine with seasonal Halloween decorations in neutral, earth tones, articles about hosting dinner parties and advertisements for pastel pantsuits. Sarah felt a rush of scorn followed by a tendril of reluctant recognition of the gesture. 

She wishes she could read but she’s just too seasick. She idly looks through the pictures in the magazine, feeling sweaty, wet on the side of her face where the heat pack rests, and utterly wretched. She fell asleep somewhere around the instructions for DIY pumpkin potpourri pots, the waxy color pages splayed across her pillow.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I own nothing, song lyrics are co-opted and perverted for enjoyment only.

Her first impression is of silence, and solidity. 

The roar of her own blood, washing on the shores of her heart, is indiscernible, not even a whisper. The air feels cool, and her feet are planted on stone that isn’t rolling in the slightest. Looking around she sees stairs at impossible angles, stone defying gravity all around her, but what is under her feet is immovable, her body is sovereign to her, moved by no other force than her own will. 

Her moment of pure relief is interrupted by a sound. A low voice, resonant and warm, singing gently to itself. 

“Last night they loved you  
Opening doors and pulling some strings…”

She looks around for the source of the voice, and hears the pitch change, sliding up from the depths impossibly high and gentle, like a feather traced from her solar plexus up her throat, she raises her chin reflexively, as if it were actually touching her. 

“Angel….” 

Remembering suddenly that nothing is what it seems in this place, she ceases looking left or right and looks up. Above her, sitting on a set of stone stairs, upside down from her perspective, is Jareth. He idly spins a crystal he's not looking into, singing softly. 

“I'll stick with you, baby, for a thousand years  
Nothing's gonna touch you in these golden years….” 

He looks poetic and haggard, like he hadn’t slept all night, like there had been no celebration for him, only vast empty spaces. He looks like the fog over a still sea that conceals while it caresses. He looks like every bit of hope has left him and he hangs in fate’s claws in utter surrender. A Byronic, debauched, tragic prince. 

She clears her throat loudly. Then stage-coughed. 

Mismatched eyes find hers and his top lip lifts slightly in a sneer, his head tilted in greeting. 

“Here you are yet again. Come to destroy anything else? I only have just the one castle, sorry to disappoint.” 

She huffs at his absolute freaking gall. To act like HE was the one who had been transgressed upon when she had been bitten, groped, threatened with dismemberment, and nearly dunked into a bubbling pit of concentrated asshole, and then roofied, while he had enjoyed singalong hour with HER baby brother. 

“Well?” He raises his eyebrow at her. 

She swells with everything she wants to say to him. None of it comes out. What she said instead was, “You know, it’s really awkward talking to a person who is sitting on the ceiling.” 

He looks quizzically down at her. “Come down then,” he says. 

“I can’t come down,” she ground out, “you’re up.” 

He grinned suddenly, showing pointed teeth. “That is either optimistic or conceited of you Sarah, and either way I will not confirm or deny.” 

She burns bright red. “Please register my extreme lack of curiosity on THAT issue, but maybe you could explain why you brought me here?” 

He eyes her cooly, Still sitting upside down above her head, though his hair and cloak fell down around him as though he were right side up. She is getting a crick in her neck looking at him. 

“I have not brought you anywhere, neither have I answered any call. You are here of your own free will, you vicious little thing, and in fact have intruded on my solitude.” 

She laughs, a short derisive bark. “I’m sure you were having quite the brooding session before I showed up-” He shot her a look that shut her mouth in a snap, it was so raw and hurt. 

She rocks back and forth a bit, from her toes to her heels. 

A beat of silence passes. 

Jareth sighs, and says softly, “You know you may come and go in my Kingdom whenever you please. I would expect nothing less from a conqueror, though I would appreciate some sensitivity to my privacy.” 

“But I didn’t-” She pauses. “Did I?” 

“Why don’t you try waking up?” He says. “Or would you like my help?” 

“Noooo, I know better than to accept help from you, and be in debt to a fae, you slippery glitter disaster. I didn’t bring myself here and I don’t know how to get back and you did this, just like you took Toby, and took my hours, and cheated every other time. And when I wake up-” 

Roaring slammed into her skull, the world tilted and spun, and Sarah, magazine sticking to her cheek, stared blearily into her bedroom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please review and I welcome feedback and ideas! I'm thinking short little chapters like this will be the format, I also changed tense between awake and asleep to give an added sense of differentiation, does it work or is it distracting? I was trying to convey the startling clarity of suddenly being able to hear when you haven't been. Thanks!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The most resentful sick shower ever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just what it says on the tin- exploring how it feels to transition from awake to asleep, and inhabit a feverish, sluggish body once again.

Sarah felt her stomach lurch as the room oscillated slowly. The roaring closed in on her thoughts, which were primarily shock, indignation, and a sneaking disappointment to be back in her bed. It had been so nice, before they started sniping at each other. Just feeling her feet planted on the stone. Hearing the rumbling low voice silkily sliding up into the falsetto like it was inside her, hearing it felt like she wasn’t just experiencing how other people heard. Like somehow this had to be more than what was normally possible. People couldn’t just walk around like that, able to hear music that felt like that, how would they get anything done? Maybe they didn’t, because maybe no one got to hear anything like that, because only he could sing that way. Shame it had to be him that could make that sound. 

She yawned and winced as the motion set off a squeak in her ear. Her body felt heavy, sticky, and yet strangely disassociated, like she was directing it, but not fully inhabiting it, pushing it ahead of her resentfully like a shopping cart with a listing wheel. A shopping cart full of off-brand junk she didn’t want but couldn’t put back. She suddenly shuddered, hit by a memory. 

The path from bed to bathroom was as arduous as any maze, but the hot shower was a bit of relief. A roaring drone that obscured her own. She sank to the floor of the shower, carefully keeping her head out of the spray, and let the hot sting of water drill into her body. It tingled on her breasts and along her body and reminded her of the relief she could have so easily with the detachable shower head… but better not. Not with him in her mind. 

That absolute Sparkle Apocalypse Bastard. 

The way she reacted to him was instinctual, immediate. He was so provoking to her, playing his role with such studied disdain and careful amusement. At her, not with her. Never letting her in on exactly what is so funny. Never being sincere for even a moment, until it was too much and all at once, too much to believe. Just another misdirection, just another way for him to win. Surely. 

That one, swift, desolate look spoke volumes, though. More honesty than any words they’d exchanged. 

She hauled herself up in the shower, cursing and plastering a hand to the wall as the sudden elevation change set off a whirl of vertigo, and then crabbily shut off the water. 

He might have been manipulating her even in that look. Who really knew? A creature like him… her feelings, her brother, her words, were all just strings to pull and a game to play. While he was enjoying a game, she was fighting for her physical and moral survival. Their stakes were never even. 

He had taken her at her word, but she had not learned to use her words carefully enough to have them taken by him. 

Ten hours, an afterparty, and a sick day later though, she had learned a few things. Not least of which was to be suspicious of her own assumptions. She grudgingly conceded to herself that even her shower musings were pretty much useless. 

“he can’t even manage to figure out pants, and I’m giving his inner feelings this much thought.” She mumbled to herself. Not bothering to get dressed, she shuffled back to bed, draped a dry towel over her pillow to buffer her damp hair, and stared at the treacherously lurching ceiling. 

She propped her laptop on the nightstand and put GBBO on Netflix. An earlier season. The one with Nadiya. As long as she didn't look at it, the familiar, pleasant chatter would help her feel less at sea. She imagined drowsily how, if you played the show in reverse, it would look like a bunch of friends throwing a party for their friend who was the most skilled baker, to please their older relatives. Then that friend baking with several more friends, adding a new one each week, each teaching the others until they had all spread the knowledge and the flour all over and could all bake like their gifted friend. Why, she wondered, are the premises of these shows always competition? Always finding a way to win, disregarding the bonds formed along the way- sure they hold hands waiting for judgement, but that's not the focus. The outcome is. Another voice rose unbidden in her that said, yes, okay, but we like to win. And things and people have to lose for that to happen. 

She suddenly thought of the goblin houses smashed during her quest to get Toby back. So much had been destroyed for her moment of victory. Well, she justified to herself, some people can't be collaborated with. 

Sleep came slowly and resentfully and with sudden little jolts, the feeling of falling that snapped her back awake and into a sickly spin. Her body ached and she couldn’t get comfortable. Finally, she made it, in incremental stumbling steps, into unconsciousness.


	4. 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sarah seems to be turning the world a startling amount.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, it's been a while. My dad died, and I got exposed to COVID by the responders. I thought I would write while I did my isolation, but I stared at the wall instead. I read a lot, and really appreciated everyone's work. This is me getting back on the horse a bit and seeing if this plot bunny has some hops left.

The moment her mind loosens its hold on awareness, she is blinking in diffuse light. She’s standing on ground that she is fully solid on, she is within her own skin and it belongs to her. The ground below her feet grips her with recognition and… love. She doesn't know how she can feel profoundly loved through the soles of her shoes, but it's undeniable. The ground loves her, and it is still. The moment of reckoning, the clearing of the static that keeps her from fully occupying herself, is so pure that for the briefest of moments, all she can do is revel in awareness. She breathes in sharply. Humus, cold water, many years of fallen leaves, pepperwood trees nearby. All of this happens in an instant and then… there he is. 

He’s leaning against a cascara tree along the edges of a pond formed by mossy boulders that look intentionally placed, with a trickle of creek running into and out of its depths at either end. Narcissus crowds its edges under the deciduous trees. The leaf fall is deep and soft. His brown leather coat and bone pale face blend in against the slender tree with it's red and yellow leaves and still clinging black berries. His eyes are accusatory and tired. 

“Fuck.” She says. 

He takes a small breath but doesn’t otherwise respond. 

“No, no this was not the plan, I want to be back in bed!” She spits out. 

The world flips- but not like it does for her normally, where it is rolling completely out of her control and with nothing for her to hold on to. The world flips like a magnetic chess board, on which she is the firmly anchored queen. When it rights itself, she is in her bed, GBBO faintly playing, and HE, The Goblin King, His Royal Tightness, is sitting on the end of her bed, wearing an expression that has drifted from exhausted to amused back to exhausted in the time it takes for her to look. 

A moment of perfect clarity, and then, roaring in like a train, her ear infection collides with her and she is utterly miserable once again. 

She has a moment of dissonance where Jareth is speaking, she can see his mouth moving, but his voice is blurring into the ambient sounds of both GBBO and her own internal roaring. He stops, watching her face. She rolls over and pauses GBBO and directs her unsteady glare at him. 

"What." She grinds out "Do you mean by this?" 

His lower lip moves just slightly with his exhalation. He looks frustrated and young and sad. None of the gloating and preening. 

She's already watching his lips and so sees more than hears his response. 

"This is your party, precious." 

She huffed and winced as a sudden whistle like a tea kettle went off in her ear at the motion. He responded immediately, looking concerned and holding his hand out for just a moment… and then snatched it back. Looked irritated at it. Stuck it under his knee where it rested on her bed. 

"I don't know what you think you mean by that, but I'm telling you right now, something is going on here and I don't appreciate it. I won. I did the thing. I expect you to at least be honest and answer my damn questions without evasions." 

He cocked his head owlishly and looked at her intently, but didn't speak. 

Her anger, which bloomed spectacularly on sight of his face apparently, rose further still. 

"You act like I should just understand and I am frankly astonished at your presumption. You either assume I know a lot about you and your world that I have no way of knowing, which is a stunning lack of self awareness on your part, by the way, read the damn room you and your tights are not exactly normal, or you're being condescending deliberately. Either way I am TOO damn sick for this. I want you to tell me what's going on, and…" the pressure and roaring is maddening "I want to be able to hear myself THINK when you do it!" 

He opened and then shut his mouth. Cleared his throat. The pressure and pounding in her head eased. The ache and stabbing pain in her ear disappeared. The susurration of her own blood was no longer drowning out the world. 

She blinked. 

He said "Finally. I don't know why you have to make such a production out of things. If you knew what you wanted all along, and you don't say your right words, I don't see how I'm to blame. As always though…" 

He looks up at her through this wild bangs, his free hand (the one not under house arrest for bad behavior beneath his knee) is making unconscious twirling motions, the barest trace of a crystal summons. He holds the pause for a long moment.

"As always, I am yours to command. If you need me to be obtuse and cryptic so you can rage at me, I am here for you. Throw the world down around us for all I care." 

He sits upright, stretches both hands above his head for a moment, arching his lithe back, and then leans back on the foot of her bed on the heel of one hand, draping the other across his newly propped knee. 

"If you've got direct questions I assume you're capable of asking them." 

Sarah is watching him in utter absorption and comes back to herself suddenly, aware of how small and tousled she appears nestled down in her blankets. She moves her jaw a bit experimentally but her ear remains clear. She still has the normal degree of hearing loss, she can tell that, it's nothing like the crystal immediacy of the Underground. It's nothing like her raging ear infection either though. She sits up a little bit in bed and arranges herself in a hopefully dignified manner. 

"What is going on. Why are you here?" She feels those are fair and clear questions that will be difficult to twist and evade. 

He smiles, a little lopsided grin that flashes the tip of a canine tooth, his head tilting again. 

"Oh, Sarah. What's going on is we're here in your room, because as always, you stepped into my realm willingly, only to protest and bemoan your situation, and then you brought me back with you."

She is flabbergasted and annoyed. "How could I do that? I don't even know how I got there to begin with. I literally just fell asleep." 

He nodded, as though that answered the question. "Yes" he adds for clarity. 

It does not clarify.

"So, you're saying I just pop up somewhere in the Underground every time I fall asleep." 

He looks at her coolly and surprisingly seriously. "I'm saying you're doing just about exactly what you want to be doing and that you, of all people, for once and finally, should learn to consider your words. You might not take them seriously, but the Underground does." 

She lets out a long breath. 

"For the King of the Goblins had fallen in love with the girl" he says, so bitterly that her eyes locked with his in shock. "And he gave her certain powers." A faint rush of color was sliding up the planes of his face. He breaks their eye contact, looking utterly despondent. "You said those words, they're not in the book, or I should say they weren't. You declared them to be true. You are so consistently furious when taken at your word. Is it that you don't truly believe in the power you hold, or is it just that you possess so much of it that you need to hurl it against something in order to express it, and I rush to oblige you?" 

He is staring fixedly out her window, she can see the side of his face with his blown pupil gazing into the middle distance. 

"I don't even resent being the bluffs your waves crash into. It's magnificent, and I do feel chosen, and I will be frightening and confusing and anything else that is convenient, but, Sarah," He looks back at her "I am exhausted." 

She's stunned. Simply speechless. Ahead of the usual wave of combativeness rising up inside her, she impulsively reaches for his hand. His gloved hand slips buttery smooth against her palm and she holds it for a moment, then sits back up, having leaned too far for comfort in order to grab it.

"Well." She says. "Things are not always what they seem, and I have learned a lot but, I still don't understand enough. I don't want to be... waves... or to define myself by bashing against you, it's just, you have to admit you play the role well." 

He swells a bit at that, a moment of the purring villain showing, and accepts the compliment. 

"Can we just talk? Simply? Without you deciding who I want you to be, or playing against me without me knowing the rules? I just want you to be clear."

He laughs almost imperceptibly, a subterranean tremor of his shoulders is all, and says "I highly doubt I could do otherwise if you ask me so directly. You are, after all, the champion."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter is the one I actually had the initial jdea to write, and I'm really giggly about it and also intimidated. I've never written dialogue before and I'm sort of fumbling, but I think I'm learning, and that's neat! Thanks for the comments, they give me joy and happiness.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Magic, how does it work? This chapter is the head cannon I developed as a kid watching this movie. The concept of time and history changing holistically with changes in the future, and a certain example about Napoleon, are taken directly from Borgle, by Daniel Pinkwater, which was a beloved book of mine at around the same age I first watched this movie.

She fidgets for a moment and then blurts out: "what are you?" 

He actually laughs, a short sharp bark that sounds feral, both amused and a little derisive. 

"What are you? Precious thing, I am what you see before you. I'm just Jareth, nothing more, but if you turn me just the right way, and look into my eyes, I will show you your dreams." 

His face still holds the heat signature of laughter but his eyes are suddenly dark. Her ears feel hot. She fists her hands in the pockets of her terrycloth robe. Her chest feels heavy, and she is suddenly hyper aware of her breathing. 

"Okay…" she says on a long exhale "that was a rude question I suppose. Maybe a better one is why are you. Why does Hoggle look like the little book end I have over there, why does so much of the Labyrinth look like the things from my room that I loved as a kid?" 

He smirks outright at that. "What a question. I appreciate your attention, and your expectation that I can answer such things." He muses, pursing his lips and rubbing his long fingers against his thumb, and then flips his leather clad fingers lightly, and a crystal appears. She flinches, and noticing, he waves it away. "Habit" he says, shrugging. 

He settles a little on the bed, looking pensive. He doesn't know how to explain for a long while. 

"Wishes create the world, and time moves to accommodate them. You brought your dreams and perceptions and ideas into a world that exists, and it changed both the world and your perceptions and history, along with the rest of the world adjusted accordingly." 

She stares blankly. 

He sucks his teeth slightly, considering. 

"Sarah, if you for instance were to make a wish to me that your Napoleon Bonaparte, the awful Frenchman, were to be a nine foot tall man-" 

"Why would I want that? I don't even want regular sized Napoleon. He was a pretty violent guy wasn't he?" She flips her still slightly damp hair behind her, making sure it's not touching the wood headboard. 

"That's beside the point. Say you want that for some reason" 

"I don't" 

"Granted. I will not touch Napoleon. However say you did, and say I was sufficiently amused by your request to grant it. Time would adjust to his suddenly large size by giving him giant ancestors, and if I wasn't very, very careful, giant descendants. Magic changes the world and the world changes to contain magic." 

She frowns. He looks expectant. 

"He would have always been a giant, Sarah." 

She blinks, slowly, and absorbs this. "So, which came first? Did my toys and posters and books change to reflect the Labyrinth, or did the Labyrinth change to reflect my expectations of what it would be?" 

He props his foot up on the bed, she notices he's casually slipped out of his ankle high boots, and rests his chin on his knee, gazing at her warmly and a little unnervingly. He has slow running honey in his eyes which drips into his voice. 

"Who can tell? I know I have done my best to meet your expectations. Perhaps it's both. Perhaps the world is being made as we experience it. Perhaps all of reality is this way. I remember myself before your dreams, but maybe even my own memories are like Napoleon's ancestors- giants because they must be to provide the scaffolding for your wish." 

He sighs. "The Escher room was definitely you though." 

It's Sarah's turn to laugh. 

He preens, reminding her sharply once more of a bird of prey, a dangerous thing with soft wings and big intense eyes peering down a sharp nose at her.

"So the toys and dolls changed because-" he interrupted her with a hand held out, but gently. "No Sarah. They were always that way. That's the point. They now always have been. Just like the book has always contained your words. If I can trace the path of the magic a bit more than most, well, that's my thing in life, I trace the paths between the stars. If I move them unless I shift the whole history of the universe."

The immensity of what he is saying shakes her. She's thought of magic as immediate and specific, the ability to change something or move something out of nothing. The idea that the whole of existence also has to shift to contextualize and accommodate the change never occurred to her, and it's deeply profound. His exasperation at everything he did for her, which, that's a load of crap, but still… makes more sense. She shivers a little. Could he really have that much power? She breaks from her thoughts suddenly when she feels his eyes on her, watching her slight frown of concentration. 

She realizes that for all she has looked at him, obsessed really, and considered how he appears to her, she's never really thought about how he sees her. 

"Do you want to ask me anything?" She offers a bit shyly. "It's only fair we take turns. Even if the answer to my last question was as clear as mud." 

"What about mud isn't clear enough to you?!" He snapps cattily. "Take dirt, add water, magic spell accomplished. You certainly wore enough of it to be familiar with the formula." He gives her an arch look. "Your expectations are so high. I'm truly flattered by how much confidence you show me." 

She all but chokes to death on her laugh. He delicately adjusts the fingers of his gloves and pointedly doesn't notice. 

Still looking down, he says quietly "I know how important fairness is to you, you invoke it frequently. There are a few things I would like to ask you." She waits expectantly but he is quiet a long time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Seriously I don't know what he's thinking yet. Also, Jareth is trying *so hard* to be smooth but he's a massive dweeb who spends most of his time doing sparkly dance numbers with goblins, so.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Head canon, head canon, HEAD CANON. 
> 
> I wanted to give Jareth a magical backstory that was still based in our world and his intense love of a certain school of musical thought with specific roots. 
> 
> Heavily based on how I interpreted the Underground music video. Actually, it's just the underground music video. With some bits of trivia about what live was like during the Blitz, mussed around a bit so I could have the story I wanted.

"Do they still have clubs where they play the Blues?" He blurts out, and immediately sucks in a quick breath like he might try to draw the words back in. 

She is stunned. Of all the things she might have imagined, that question wasn't even on the list. 

"Yes, I'm sure they do." She responds slowly, watching the tips of his ears turning pink as he uncharacteristically avoids her eyes. "You like music, don't you?" 

He meets her eyes, and that spark of the ethereal is there, but he also looks every bit like a slightly vulnerable teenager hiding behind posturing. 

"Everyone likes music" he scoffs. "What else is there?" He pauses. "Images, to be sure, but they need music to move them along." 

Sarah smiles wryly and a bit sadly, fidgeting in her blankets a little. He peers at her owlishly once again, tilting his head to glimpse under the fall of her hair across her face. 

"Not me," she finally says, smiling bravely and meeting his eyes. "My ears are a mess. I've had surgery, and scar tissue, and holes in the drums, and all kinds of issues." She feels a sinking feeling, but it's buffered slightly by something new, something she realizes as she says it. 

"Your voice is the only one I've fully heard sing in my memory… something about the Underground clears everything up. I can hear perfectly, actually it has to be better than normal people can hear, they can't be able to hear what I heard you sing all the time…" she trails off. 

He is watching her in rapt, almost predatory attention, a little edge of glee in it. 

"Why do you say that, you precious thing?" He asks gently, with suppressed preening. 

Her cheeks burn as she replies, "How could anyone do anything else, when they could be hearing that? There must be some magic, some spell you put on me that heightens it."

He looks performatively wounded. "No, no. You said the words yourself and they are binding. I put no spell on you. I really can sing like that. How fortunate for us both, that mine is the only voice you have yet heard sing. We'll have to continue that. I'll sing you endless paths along cliff tops at sunset, I'll sing you every bubble in a bottle of champagne, I'll sing you volcanos and supernovas and…" he stops, lost in his musings. 

She interjects with another question, "Why ask me about the Blues?" 

He shakes his head slightly. "What?" He meets her gaze again, pulling his thousand yard stare back from it's wanderings. "Blues, Jazz, whatever the good music is called at the moment… I love human music. It's the thing you do best. That and dreaming. Both are mathematical but not bloodless, both are uniquely individual but inextricably communal at the same time." 

"Lost on me," she says lightly. 

His gaze is tentative, still prideful but slightly hopeful. "Want to find a bit of it?" He asks. 

She immediately balks. "What are you suggesting? I'm not making any deals and I'm not going anywhere with you," she blurts out. "I have learned some lessons, I'm not trading my ears for my brother."

He does a very surprising thing then. He dramatically flops backwards onto the foot of her bed, his hand across his forehead like a fainting damsel. She stares down at him on her coverlet in surprise and indignation. She can feel his back on the tops of her feet. 

"Sarah." He states in what he probably thinks is a calm and reasonable voice. "I do not actually want your brother, you know. I wanted to do what you asked. I wanted to play the game with you." 

"GAME!?" She shrieks. 

"Yes Sarah, game." He turns his head, looking at her sideways, his downy hair standing out like a halo in the late afternoon light filtering through her window. "You asked for my attention, I gave it to you. It was never about anything else. You commanded me to be honest and to speak plainly and I have. That is the crux of it." 

His legs are akimbo on the end of the bed, where they had been sprawled when he was sitting, and his back was curved across her feet and mattress. He seems to be casually tossed, but something in his musculature betrays a tension, a holding in waiting. She sits up and leans forward over her knees, so she can see him more clearly, and becomes aware she was looming over him as he lays on his back. It is intimate, and his simultaneous affectation of abandon and tension play together in her mind. His eyes are so different from any she has seen. His cheekbones look carved by glaciers, like the smooth sweep and sharp edges of granite that's known immense force. 

"So what was it you wanted to show me," she says, a bit breathless, close enough to reach out and place her hand on his chest if she dared to. Her fingertips twitch with the impulse. 

"I've been in your dream, little vicious thing," he whispers. "Come see one of mine." 

She wordlessly nods, her eyes never leaving his face. He twirls his hand above his chest, manifesting a clear crystal, it's swirling surface hinting at motions within. She reaches for it, and it bursts upon contact with her fingertips. Her hand slides through the space it had been, and onto his hand, held against his chest. She slowly sinks down until her head rests next to it, her eyes dilating and then gradually closing. 

He lightly strokes her hair with his free hand, and murmurs "See you in a moment, love." As he too drifts away. 

It was a dark night, a young man followed the plumes of his breath in the cold air, leading the way. He was hurrying between brick buildings, the industrial smell of soot and steam clinging to the thick air, and beneath it the city smell of masses of people's lives, their voices mingling with the odd flash of light at a door and burst of steam. 

He was walking along a river, it's not one she knows. She's somehow within him, and aware of herself, and watching from above. Feeling his rough wool coat moving against his shoulders as he shrugs it closer, feeling his boots hitting cobbles. 

Sinking into him, she can hear his thoughts in a faint way. He's thinking of work, of making lenses, polishing glass and crystal, to look at massive and far away things and close and incredibly tiny things. Before the war, the man for whom he worked had been a clock maker and a microscope maker, and he had done both with him, but now, they almost entirely made instruments for periscopes and binoculars, the kind of technical distance seeing people needed to do so much of, and the work had changed from artisan craft in a quiet shop, to the hand making of model pieces to be replicated in a factory.   
He briefly sent an image of Ireland shooting across his mind, his poor mother, his father of whom she never spoke. He had been sent here, for an apprenticeship, to a city that startled and disgusted and seduced and thrilled him. 

He tugged his coarse wool closer against the chill and the light drizzle that's beginning to come down, looking like golden halos anywhere there's a light in a window, though there aren't many. Thick tar paper covered any light from above, the moonlight was the only serious illumination, even that obscured by fog. He felt the scratch of the coat on his sensitive throat and thought longingly of the slippery soft dresses the women wore when they sang on stage, the pearls that slid with their smooth lacquered surface of the sea, imagining the touch of silk on his skin. His cheeks were hot even alone in his own thoughts. He resented the limitations of his sex and social status. There was a war on, of course. Even the women were doing without delicate and beautiful things, he knew. He still wanted to wear them.   
He arrived past a row of dim shops and people clattering through the haze, to a place of glowing light and warmth. A press of bodies and a change of the tone of language, a murmuring of a crowd seeking conviviality. Sarah's consciousness was dimly astounded at the clothes, the accents. This was a club, in some industrial bygone city on another continent. The people were a blend of skin colors and clothing styles, but many were in uniform, and the women wore neat dresses with cinched waists and full skirts, with their hair short and rolled in waves. 

He angled himself between tables and wedged himself in a corner, watching the band beginning to play. Sarah lost track of how long they stayed there, in the smoky room, close together with so many people pressing on all sides, hearing impossibly sultry and complex sounds. The jazz rose and fell, and answered itself like an equation, it contained variations on a theme, teasing explorations that challenged a response from the others, a whole conversation taking place without any voices, just with instruments. His perfect ears followed them all, like a hound on a riot of overlapping rabbit trails. "The Americans," His thoughts hummed. "They are so brilliant but so savage to each other. I'm afraid of them, but I want to never stop hearing them play."   
The song, that was really an elaborate exchange of ideas, the group holding the theme while the individual explored it's edges, came to an end.   
He was beckoned by one player, then the others. A few short cries went up from the crowd- 'the Irishman! That skinny kid is here again! Get a load of this' went around the room. 

Sarah, within him, felt his palms sweat and his knee bounce nervously, but he walked up directly and without swagger, nodded to everyone, and holding his hat in one hand, by his side, energy trembling through him, slid into song along with their instruments.   
Sarah could live within him, she thought. She could stay in that resonating chamber that was so powerful and so subtle. Hearing it from the outside had been transformative, being behind his eyes, looking out at the smoke obscured kaleidoscope of faces swirled together by the lights, was entirely another thing. That time was out of conscious reckoning, the response from the room, the rowdy people bolstering each other against the dark outside, the heavily covered windows keeping out fear, and the music threading through everything like ribbon.

It lasted for a golden span of minutes, in which he sang about love, and lights, and homesickness, and then the whole building jerked like it had been slapped, killing the music in a sudden brutal, discordant wrench. The people scramble, some down and some up, those in uniforms headed out the darkly covered glass door in the front. 

He was pushed back by the tide of people, towards the back door behind the stage, the band were all soldiers, headed forward, almost swimming against the crowd, but his light frame was pushed back, away from them and ultimately out into the alley behind the club. His head cracked hard against the door frame in the press of bodies and there was a sticky hot seep in his hair. Sarah, both acutely aware of him and discorporate, felt dread at the hot feeling on his scalp and neck. 

It only seemed to be that one shell at first. Most of the women and civilian men stayed close by, in the basement of the venue. Soldiers cautiously peered upwards, waiting for orders on a hand cranked radio. He stumbled away from all of it, down the alley. He could smell the river somewhere ahead, both rank and vitally wet. 

He came around a corner and the city skyline opened between the buildings for a moment and he began to see red spots, glowing in the distance, and a whine building and building like an ominous hive of bees. He turned away and stumbled, shocked, further into the alley. Eyes followed him, unseen by him, but observed by his silent watcher Sarah, who saw them turn to follow him on trembling stalks of lichen.

The whine stopped. Somewhere in his rational mind he knew that meant he had less than a minute. 

He began to descend a staircase as if in a dream.   
The staircase slowly but deliberately began to disappear into the cobblestones.   
Alarm rose higher in Sarah. He slipped, his arms flying up and his heels sliding over what had become a smooth and slick surface. Deep within him, Sarah screamed…

And she wakes with a start, her breath fast and heart pounding, her head pillowed on Jareth's chest, her hand clenched in a fist of his shirt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think they should probably touch each other's butts at some point. Thoughts?

**Author's Note:**

> Please let me know what you think and give any feedback! I've never done this before but I'm planning on at least 3 chapters, rated M mostly for safety but its likely the extremely tight pants will stay on. Probably.


End file.
